Training Materials

Handling Complaints

1-Day Course on How to Respond to and Manage Customer Complaints

Fully Customisable Training Course Material: Description

“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect.
They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”

Donald Porter

Complaint handling is an essential and useful skill. Whether it is your customer who is complaining, or your client, supplier or even your colleague, you have a great opportunity to see yourself from another’s point of view. This feedback can prove to be invaluable and the handling of such criticism can do wonders for the image and productivity of your business.

It is often said that the way you handle a complaint is far more important than the solution you provide. Indeed, research shows that skilled handling can lead to long term customer loyalty. There is also an increased likelihood for your customers to spread the word and let others know about your great service.

Handling complaints well requires practice and an exposure to a wide variety of situations. This course is fundamentally designed around examples and scenarios to accelerate this exposure and help delegates to quickly go through a series of common scenarios. Critical examples are provided on how a particular situation can be addressed poorly and what better alternatives exist in handling such situations. By observing bad attitudes and conversations, delegates can quickly learn what doesn’t work and why. This helps them to remember the skills longer and apply them more successfully in real world situations.

Delegates get to participate in interactive exercises, group activities and roleplays to master the skills and become better at handling confrontations, aggressive or difficult people.

As always, the training resources contain all your need to run a course on handling complaints, including numerous exercises, workbook and comprehensive trainer notes.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Nature of Complaints

Why people complain?

Who complains?

What people think of complainers?

What is the correct attitude towards complaints and handling complaints?

Listening Skills

What types of listeners exist?

What are advantages and disadvantages of each listening type?

What is Active Listening?

How does Active Listening help you handle complaints better?

Handling Complaints

What types of complainers exist?

What are the best strategies to deal with each type of complainers?

What should you be aware of when dealing with each type to prevent the encounter from becoming unproductive?

Complaint Handling Scenarios

What are the common challenging scenarios when handling complaints or serving customers?

How to handle aggressive complainers

How to stop people from using others as an audience when complaining

What to avoid when handling complaints to reduce the likelihood of confrontations?

How to deal with slow speakers

How to manage careless remarks

Assertiveness Skills

What is assertiveness?

How to be assertive

How does assertiveness differ from aggressive or passive behaviour?

How to construct your sentences to express yourself assertively when responding to complaints

Body Language

What are the critical postures and gestures to observe when handling complaints?

How not to appear defensive and confrontational

What postures to use to make the other person feel calm and cared for?

Samples of Handling Complaints Training Materials

Delegates will learn ...

Hold a positive attitude towards complaints and appreciate how they benefit organisations.

Use Active Listening techniques when handling complaints to help establish rapport and leave a positive impression

Respond to common challenging scenarios and handle complaints in an efficient manner

How to communicate assertively with customers when handling complaints for a win-win outcome

Increase the effectiveness of your communication with others using body language

The Philosophy Behind Handling Complaints Skills Training Course

This course is designed around various scenarios and exercises and as a result is highly example-driven. In our experience, the most effective way of training is to let delegates go through example after example to see clearly what works and what doesn’t. From these examples, they can infer a pattern of behaviour which is remembered for a long time afterwards and is much more effective than going through a number of bullet-pointed guidelines.

Using the principles of Accelerates Learning, the interactive exercises also help to increase retention so the skills are used much longer after the course and are more likely to become habits over time.

The course also contains specific sessions on related topics such as assertiveness and body language along with relevant exercises that further help delegates to focus on these specific skills individually. This repetition over topics, in examples and scenarios and later in specific dedicated sessions, further enables delegates to fully understand the techniques and learn the skills during the course.

Extend This Course With The Following Training Resources

Other Ideal Courses to be Used in Conjunction With Handling Complaints Training Materials Are:

Our Promise

Skills Converged is a unique company that provides professionally designed fully-customisable training course materials based on the latest research in learning & development. Courses are designed with attention to detail both on content and style so that you can deliver unique state-of-the-art courses to your clients and get maximum results.

We Provide Training

We can also provide this training course for your staff or your organisation anywhere in the UK. Please contact us for more details.